Confirmed: YouTube Adding Downloads, Including For-Pay

Last month, a link to download President Obama’s weekly address was spotted on YouTube, fueling speculation that YouTube would soon offer the option to download videos to a broader audience. Today, the company confirmed that downloads are indeed coming to YouTube, with an interesting additional twist: paid downloads.

In a blog post, YouTube writes, “partners could choose to offer their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through Google Checkout. Partners can set prices and decide which license they want to attach to the downloaded video files.” To start, YouTube is showcasing a number of video downloads from universities, while several popular YouTube channels are testing paid downloads.

As with the Obama video, the only format currently supported is mp4. The bigger opportunity, it would seem, is making paid downloads formatted and available for mobile devices and mp3 players, potentially turning YouTube into a competitor to iTunes.

Of course, a lot of other things would have to happen in between there and here – deals with more movies studios, tv networks, and record labels, a system for YouTube to generate transaction fees, and a crackdown on the dozens of tools that already let you download YouTube videos. Nonetheless, that would seem like the likely direction for YouTube and its new download features, especially given the limited success the site has had with other revenue generating features so far.

Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered cash to kill story

Originally posted by Mark Frauenfelder

Amazing story from amateur sociologist Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com. In short, Rob wrote a funny article about the questionable practices of Cash4Gold, a company that offers money for gold jewelry and coins you send them. (Read his article, “Cash4Gold Will Offer One-Third of the Actual Value for your Gold.”)

Rob’s article was picked up by Boing Boing and the Consumerist, and his article shot to the top of Google for searches on Cash4Gold. In about a week, Rob got the following email:

I work on the Cash4Gold site. We are trying to clean up their first page of results in Google. Your article: http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/goldkit/cheat.shtml is ranking very well for term “Cash4Gold”. The site looks like you may do well from Adsense.Is there a financial arrangement we can come to that will offset your Adsense income and make it worth your while to take down or at least “de-optimize” it for that phrase? I would be happy to speak more about this on the phone…

Thanks, 
Joe Laratro 
President 
Tandem Interactive – Trendy Online Marketing Solutions 
Hollywood, FL 33020

Rob ignored him, and in a couple of weeks Mr. Larato sent him a follow up email:

Rob,I work with Cash4Gold on the reputation management. Your article is ranking #3 on their brand term. They would really like to make it worth your while to take it down or make it more positive. They did something similar by joining (OTHER CONSUMER AFFAIRS WEBSITE)’s advocacy program. Is it worth a few thousand to take it down? If not, maybe a donation to your favorite charity is more to your liking?

Feel free to call me anytime to discuss further.

Thanks, 
Joe Laratro 
President 
Tandem Interactive – Trendy Online Marketing Solutions 
Hollywood, FL 33020

Rob didn’t take the “few thousand” and his story is still at the top of Google. (And who in the heck is the “OTHER CONSUMER AFFAIRS WEBSITE” that took the bribe? I wish Rob would tell!)

Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered cash to kill story

Puma advertising

 

Agency: Robert/Boisen & Like-minded, Denmark
Creatives: Peter Metcalfe, Jannik Davidsen
Creative Director: Michael Robert
Illustrator: Evergrunge

The Twitter Effect

posted in Main, by Pingdom

Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.

An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.

For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)

But now on to the big question…

How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
First of all, of course it was a big factor that Pete Cashmore is one of the people on Twitter with the most followers (people who have subscribed to his tweets). According to Twitterholic, he has more than 50,000 followers.

But the key here may not be just the number of followers of the initial tweeter, but the retweets. A retweet is when a Twitter user resends a message so that his/her own followers can share it. Pete Cashmore was the most retweeted Twitter user during the period when the affected blog went down (according to Retweetist).

The interesting thing about retweets is that they have the potential to increase the spread of a tweet exponentially, especially if some of the retweeters also have many followers.

It might be worth pointing out that the blog that crashed was on a shared hosting account (at Dreamhost). A blog on a dedicated server or a cluster would have handled the amount of traffic better, but what happened is still very relevant. There are a LOT of blogs on shared hosting accounts, and as Twitter keeps growing, who knows what kind of traffic generation it will be capable of?

The Twitter Effect formula
If we take a stab at formulating how a single tweet can garner so much traffic, it would be something like this (which essentially describes the reach of a tweet on Twitter):

The Twitter Effect formula = (Original tweet * followers) + (retweets * followers of retweeters) + (retweets of retweets * followers of those), and so on.

This way, tweets can spread out like the branches of a tree or a root system and reach a very large number of Twitter users. The spread is basically only limited by the size of Twitter’s user base. If the tweet contains a link to a site, this site is bound to get a significant amount of traffic as the tweet spreads.

Note that there may also be more than one original tweet pointing to the same target, and the general discussion around a post on other parts of the Web is also bound to create its share of activity on Twitter (and elsewhere too, of course).

Think of it as “the great echo chamber” and you get the gist of it. It’s similar to how much of the blogosphere works, which is a good analogy since Twitter is, after all, usually called a microblogging service.

Speed Dating comes to iPhone

by Joel Johnson

While there’s already a dating application for iPhone—it’s called “Facebook”—the new mobile application from SpeedDate.com might be the first with dedicated “Wink” and “Flirt” buttons. It’s available today on the iTunes App Store for free.

And once you’ve lured your victim to a secure area, how best to impress upon them the density of your love? You can make them stick their greasy thumb along with yours on The Love Meter application, which any good pick-up tool has a “Love Attack” mode that tilts the compatibility rating in your favor. (Not to be confused with plain ol’ Love Meter.)

The Love Meter is one whole dollar.

Get 626,369 songs in 37,483 albums by 2,082 artists for free

Dean Putney writes:

I wanted to listen to the music on the Live Music Archive because it is awesome and public domain, but if you’ve ever tried to actually do that, you’ll know it’s a major pain. I wrote a Perl script to crawl through the Live Music Archive and make an XML file of all the streamable songs, and now I’m putting the information from the XML file into MySQL databases to populate this interface. I’m also tweaking the interface to make it look nice and neat.

Dewey is named after the Dewey Decimal System because it organizes the Live Music Archive library in the same way that the Dewey Decimal System does. I understand that sifting through that many artists is a bit daunting if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I’ve added Genre tags that are pulled from Last.fm to help you find your style, and a search function to help you find exactly what you want. While I look into better options, and as the database grows, let me suggest that you use the “Concerts From Today” tab to narrow down your listening possibilities while browsing. I hope to be adding rating, tagging and commenting functionality soon.

Dewey Music

The Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Materialism

By Rebecca Sato

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Sure, one person being less materialistic isn’t going to make a noticeable impact on the environment, but it will make a positive impact in that one life. Once entire nations start to understand the myths about what really makes individuals happy, the world will stand a fighting chance.

That funny statement, is only funny because it’s somewhat true. The reason people want whatever is currently “hot” is because they believe it will contribute towards their satisfaction and happiness in life. The word “believe” is the key here. People believe that buying more and more things will make them happy, when in fact research has shown time and time again that this simply isn’t the case. What we do know for sure is that buying more and more unnecessary things is damaging our planet and contributing to global warming.

Mad Magazine summed it up with the statement, “The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”

Researchers have found that low self-esteem and materialism are not just a correlation, but also a causal relationship where low self esteem increases materialism, and materialism can also create low self-esteem. The also found that as self esteem increases, materialism decreases. The study primarily focused on how this relationship affects children and adolescents. Lan Nguyen Chaplin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Deborah Roedder John (University of Minnesota) found that even a simple gesture to raise self-esteem dramatically decreased materialism, which provides a way to cope with insecurity.

“By the time children reach early adolescence, and experience a decline in self-esteem, the stage is set for the use of material possessions as a coping strategy for feelings of low self-worth,” they write in the study, which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The paradox that findings such as these bring up, is that consumerism is good for the economy but bad for the individual. In the short run, it’s good for the economy when young people believe they need to buy an entirely new wardrobe every year, for example. But the hidden cost is much higher than the dollar amount. There are costs in happiness when people believe that their value is extrinsic. There are also environmental costs associated with widespread materialism.

In the book “Happiness: Lessons From a New Science”, Richard Layard exposes a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan.

Statistically people have more things than they did 50 years ago, but they are actually less happy in several key areas. There is also the considerable cost of what materialism does to the environment. We don’t yet know what final toll that could take in terms of quality of life and overall happiness. What many people don’t understand is that if we want to save the environment then at some level we have to buy and consume less. We don’t need to buy so much bottled water, for example. Studies have shown it’s usually not any purer than city tap water, which doesn’t leave mountains of plastic bottles strewn across the nations landfills. It also wastes energy and resources to make those plastic bottles and the many other unnecessary things that both youth and adults alike believe they need to have in order to enjoy life and feel good about themselves.

Mad Magazine summed it up with the statement, “The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”

That funny statement, is only funny because it’s somewhat true. The reason people want whatever is currently “hot” is because they believe it will contribute towards their satisfaction and happiness in life. The word “believe” is the key here. People believe that buying more and more things will make them happy, when in fact research has shown time and time again that this simply isn’t the case. What we do know for sure is that buying more and more unnecessary things is damaging our planet and contributing to global warming.

Sure, one person being less materialistic isn’t going to make a noticeable impact on the environment, but it will make a positive impact in that one life. Once entire nations start to understand the myths about what really makes individuals happy, the world will stand a fighting chance.

Google Earth goes underwater and more!

By Bobbie Johnson, guardian.co.uk

Since Google Earth launched in 2006 millions of people have used its virtual globe to “travel” around the planet without leaving home, climbing a digital version of Mount Everest and even flying into space thanks to the website.

Now the internet company plans to take on one of the last bastions of the unknown: the depths of the ocean.

At a high-profile event in San Francisco, Google is expected to announce the addition of vast amounts of underwater imagery and seabed maps to the Google Earth project.

The move will take Google Earth closer to its aim of creating a complete digital representation of the planet.

The existing site, to which an estimated 400 million people have had access, already includes three-dimensional representations of large cities around the world and includes images from street-level and aerial photo graphy covering thousands of miles across Britain and elsewhere.

The new additions to the website are expected to include views of the ocean, and portions of the seabed. They will also provide detailed environmental data that will enhance information about the effect of climate change on the world’s seas and oceans.

To showcase the transformation, the site’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, will introduce dignitaries including the former US vice president and environmental campaigner Al Gore, and the veteran ocean ographer Sylvia Earle, who is an “explorer-in-residence” at National Geographic.

Although, so far, there has been only limited data collected about the sea floor, with just 10% of the habitat mapped at any useful scale for science, bathymetry experts said that the public’s ability to “interact” with the oceans and gain better understanding, as well as see the evidence of global warming, could have quite an impact on perceptions.

Porn flashes across TVs in Tucson during Super Bowl

(CNN) — Super Bowl fans in Tucson, Arizona caught a different kind of show during Sunday’s big game.

 Just as Cardinals’ superstar Larry Fitzgerald watched himself sprint into the end zone on the stadiums’ Jumbo-tron during Sunday’s Super Bowl, 10 seconds of eye-popping pornographic imagery ‘flashed’ across the screens of those watching at home.

 “We are mortified by last evening’s Super Bowl interruption, and deeply apologize to our customers for the inappropriate programming,” Comcast Cable said in a written statement.

 “Our initial investigation suggests this was an isolated malicious act,” the statement added.

 Comcast, and several local television stations that carried the  signal, say they are investigating what caused the interruption.

 “It appears this material was only viewed by some Comcast customers,” local Tucson television station, KVOA-TV, said in a written statement.

 Television station KVOA added “when the NBC feed of the Super Bowl was transmitted from KVOA to local cable providers and through over-the-air antennas, there was no pornographic material,” KVOA President and General Manager Gary Nielsen said in a separate statement.

 

 Official Site   -   NSFW!!

Facebook aims to market its user data bank to businesses

by Richard Wray, guardian.co.uk

Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old founder and chief executive, showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users.

He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes. He also polled more than 100,000 American users of the website, asking them whether they thought President Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.

Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.

Speaking to well known tech blogger Robert Scoble at the event, Zuckerberg said 2009 will be Facebook’s “intense” year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, a sartorial extra which the Harvard drop-out has so far eschewed.

He added the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors’ products.

Facebook’s advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their display adverts when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook – which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.

Last year, Facebook launched its Engagement Ads tool, which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people’s home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other Facebook users have voted. The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.

The American recruitment website tonight used its trial Facebook polls to ask people what they thought of the advert that was played during the coverage of the 43rd Super Bowl. The first widespread use of polls is expected in the spring.

Facebook also has a tool called Facebook Lexicon, which is a bit like Google Trends, in that it allows users to track what topics are being discussed by people on Facebook. While Google Trends uses the search terms that are entered into its site, Facebook Lexicon looks at one of the most visible parts of a user’s profile page – their wall, where people and their friends exchange public messages. It provides a searchable database of trends over time, showing how the incidence of particular words or phrases has increased or decreased in wall posts.

Facebook Lexicon shows that the company already has a significant database of user information which it could exploit and the tools are in place to allow companies to use its information for market research purposes.